In the effort to push the limits of Earthmother research, I tried to make an Earthmother Healthmonster. It's not bad, but I'm not sure it can handle Vicious. I tried Creeplight Ruins because it is a Hard ranked map with very open terrain. Dwarven Paladin of Earthmother with Fireheart. I also took Extra Health just to push the concept (Extra Attack is strictly better, but where's the fun in that?).

The idea is to spam Vineform as hard as you can, and take advantage of the Paladin's no-punishment clause to clear troublesome plants in between boon requests. You can get 8-10 layers by around level 4, and I would have ended up with close to 20 except that I ended up beating the dungeon

A single Vineform is roughly equivalent to a single Absolution, and a Paladin can get a useful number of them at a reasonable pace. I had enough health by level 8 to tank Zombie-Anoobis from innate health alone.

This approach suffers in "true" Vicious dungeons because of the layouts. Not enough blackspace, and the narrow corridors make it very hard to use IMAWAL. For the paladin, statues are a bigger problem than plants. Naga City might work if you scum for ENDISWAL. The "monster party" subdungeon would also be welcome, and the Smuggler's Den might even be a viable alternative to Black Market.

EDIT:It worked, but not a lot of room for error. This is probably impossible on a more crowded map.

Smugglers den in general is nice for IMAWALING the little suckers where it can't hurt, as well as providing some B2P blackspace.

And yes, using IMAWAL on slowed monsters gives you 1XP, wihch lets you level up off of on lvl2 monster kill.

Also, if anyone's doing sorcerers with Mysterea, Smugglers Den provides a very early mana booster where you know you'll find one, and you can then get two hits of magic for 30 and have 18 mana for 3 fireballs very early. If you shoot for mystic balance after that, with the other two mana boosters you are at 20 for 4 fireballs by the time you fight the boss.

Same deal with the bloodmage, except you "fix" your 3 mana defficency and get to 12, and you use the little buggers for handy bloodpools as well as extra blackspace.

Early game: Explore the entire map. We aren't going to do any wussy regen fighting. This is a strat for damage spiking he-men (or she-women) only. As you go, use JJ's guaranteed WEYTWUT to capture every single monster on the map. If you find WONAFYT, GETINDERE, or BYSEPS use those too, because they also accrue JJ piety and are more efficient. Carefully arrange your monsters in anticipation of future knock back games. Make sure that every Animated Armor can be knocked into another monster, and have the bosses and very high level monsters aligned with a long set of walls. Also, make sure to expose the walled in subdungeon. With WEYTWUT + Bear Mace, you have a 100% percent chance of accessing it.

JJ will almost certainly curse you before you complete this project. That traps you in curse world, but that's okay. Don't bother fighting things or trying to clear your curse stacks until after you have Petition, which should happen somewhere around the 25% explored mark.

With the whole map explored, you have defanged the Shades and their irritating Life Steal. It may seem like a horrible waste to burn your exploration at 1st level, but with Life Stealers on the board, you never really had that blackspace to begin with. Do leave a few odd corners unexplored. Basically, anything that you know for sure is going to be a wall tile or part of the lake should be left black if you can help it. We aren't going to regen fight, but we will need a few scraps to manipulate our health levels.

Now, vacuum up all of the resources. Buy and convert shop junk. We need tons of potions. The Fireheart is the only item that might be worth keeping. Trash most of your glyphs except for Fireball , GETINDERE, and IMAWAL. Don't leave anything on the ground because we are about to dive into the curse world and aren't coming back until the very end.

Take two levels of Boost Health. You do not want the third level and you will not benefit from Boost Mana. Keep everything else for Chaos Avatar and Last Chance.

Now level up with as few kills as possible. Take on the biggest thing that you can while only using one potion. Aim for 3 or 4 levels higher than yourself. Use every bit of health and mana during every round. If a monster knocks you down to 49% of your health, don't drink your potion like a chump, explore a tile to get up to 52% and then let the monster knock you back down to 1% and THEN drink your potion. If you find yourself in the middle of a level with your heath and mana empty, just eat popcorn to get back up. Use Choas Avatar when your piety is in danger of overflowing. Since every monster is exposed and positioned by you, you should be able to use CA with zero waste of xp.

Keep going. Your goal should be to get all of the 7+ level monsters off of the board, as well as wear down the mid level AAs. You want to get all of the 'hard xp' off of the table. Kill the Shade boss the moment that you can do so with only 2 potions or one potion + a level up.

When it's time to square off against the Dragon, you should have enough pre-slowed popcorn to level up twice. You should also be approaching 100 piety again, which means that you have Last Chance as an option. Don't pop your potions until you hit level 10 for maximum efficiency. Every single hit on the Dragon should be a knockback through a wall, or maybe into a level 9 monster that you left hanging around just for this purpose. You should win with plenty of leftover potions.

This strat works because it brutally screws almost every monster type on the map:

Thrall: Priest + Trisword lets up pop those guys like balloons. Their mana burn and poison abilities don't matter as much when you are relying on dings and potions for all of your refills.

Animated Armors: Because you explored the map, you will always have the Fireball glpyh. With that and the Bearmace and guaranteed ideal positioning you can tear through their death protections.

Shades: Exploring at 1st level preempts Life Steal and makes Blink irrelevant (notthat Blink works against the Bearmace anyway). Their physical resistance is little help against a Priest with a Trisword.

Bandit: You don't care about curse. That's the advantage to health stacking versus resistance stacking. Without curse, bandits are nothing.

Dragon: Okay, so you don't have a direct answer to them, but with your piles of health you'll be okay.

Not so sure if this will work in VICIOUS. Leveling is a lot less efficient in VICIOUS. The spiral of having to spend more potions for less xp is pretty nasty.

Last edited by Sidestepper on Thu Apr 25, 2013 2:32 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I'm thinking about posting my CP monster strat but I've yet to test it against VICIOUS dungeons (getting really close to 100% sub-vicoious).

Definitely interested in hearing it, VICIOUS or no.

After fiddling around some more, I found you can further optimize things by wearing down mid level AAs during the exploration phase. With two stacks of boost health, you can drop a fireball on an AA-6 and then Bearmace it to remove 2 death protections. The health you lose was going to be lost to exploration overkill anyway, and the 6 mana is probably worth it.

I found that I definitely want to line up all of the 7+s with a row of walls. Two or three walls are plenty. Mid-level AAs I like to clump up into a four man square formation. That way, I can knock any given AA into any other AA, and this remains the case even as the AAs begin to die off.

You can catfight much, much harder than you might think. I took down a Thrall-9 from level 4, using only one potion. Health stacking + Priest potions + Priest undead damage is brutal. Dragons are your weakest match up, but if you lined up your walls right, you can usually score a 3 level difference against them, more if you softened it up with spare resources from your previous level.

Well, it's not much of a strat so far, and I'm waiting on possible adjustments or clarification on the possibility of stacking Transmutation seals. It most likely won't be possible, (because it's a bit braindead, so to speak), and it would only work reliably with Tinkers. Howeverz:

Someone (shoutout) clued me in to bringing a transmutation seal into VGT to transmute a Sensation Stone and then convert another Sensation stone, for a whooping 375 CP. Now, this also works with Fewer Glyphs, and glyphs you bring into the dungeon with you also get their CP value increased, and so do (some) glyphs you find in subdungeons, like the one get from pendragon or Contemplate the Waters. Also, Sensation stone is obviously lockerable, so make sure to prep and transmute IT.

So if you pick an Orc whatever and only keep one glyph (possibly the free Getindare from TT), you can get 375 + up to 600 from glyphs. Thats... +24 damage just from glyph conversions, and you also got 20 gold to buy some more conversion fodder. Thats the old Trisword, and you can tack it onto anything (except it costs you exploration and fat kingdom cash so I'm not sure it's really broken).

Now if you go Tinker, you can add about 150 CP more to that. If you go Half-Dragon... If you go Half-Dragon it gets hilarious - you can (and should) actually melee down the magic immune Goblin in Magma Mines first because of your huge knocback (which is either physical or unresistable damage). And I haven't even tried it with Binlor in the mix...

If you go Orc Wizard with fewer glyphs and Binlor, you should be able to really go nuts.

Add spirit pact if possible, etc, etc.

But since it's works with any CP practically anywhere (and there's places where it works better than usual), the possibilities are quite limitless. Halfling priest of drac for a million piety? Halfling priest for a million hits on anything? Dwarven tinker healthmonster? Orc Rogues lvl1 bosskill? Human Transmuter? Halfling monks with trisword? Monks in general?

Melle-only Orc paladins feel really busted with this as well...

Anyway, it's an expensive sport as far as prepping goes, but it's really, really strong, and I feel like I've only scratched the surface. You can actually play fewer glyph elves and rock...

Yeah, if you're going orc, TT's probably the best - you can then convert every other glyph (you do have to find them, and you don't have to convert on the spot). If you're going Orc wizard, then Binlor, ofc. I mean Trans seal + Sensation stone + Big Glyph only really gives a 75 CP bonus and 20 gold but that just gets you rolling. It's a bit front loaded with orcs, but then, so was the old trisword and look where that got it.

But as I've said - as long as you can reliably go with 1 or no glyphs the CP monstering possibilities are out there for just about anyone (Including spellcasters). And a bunch of guys get mean with enough conversion. It's not a strat so much as an engine...

I'm not entirely sold on the Sensation Stone as a prep in its current incarnation. My problem is that there are already preps that exceed what you could get for the Stone:Base Damage: Fine Sword/Trisword (Fine Sword is worth 160 Orcish CP)Damage Bonus: Dwarven Gauntlets (worth 200 Human CP plus bonus health)Mana: Elven Boots (240 Elf CP plus resistance)Health: Dwarven Gauntlets again (Only 160 CP, but let's be serious, you weren't going to blow a Sensation Stone on a Dwarf anyway)Potions: The kegs (240 CP)

Less Glyphs + Transmutation is great on Orcs, no argument there, and even better with classes that get a bonus glyph, and is the best on a Wizard, who can quickly find all the glyphs and doesn't even have to trash them to get their CP. It's just that the Stone doesn't offer anything on top of this that you couldn't do better with something else.

The advantage of the SS approach is that it is universal and gives a moderate effect for any approach, and also keeps a slot open, but I gravitate towards extreme strategies. This may be a matter of taste.